As we open the gate to Adventurers for the first time since October, we want to be as clear as possible with people who may be considering joining, but aren’t a great fan of the whole Early Access experience, and are hoping TADO is pretty much complete but a little rough around the edges…
So, let’s get that out the way first, TADO is rough around the edges for sure, but is it pretty much complete? No, not really, there’s a lot of content that still needs to be finished and introduced to the world, and there’s a lot of content that’s still working its way through the pipeline. We will give more precise plans on this over the next week – the current build is pretty locked down with most of our effort in the very short term likely focused on putting out fires.
Oh no, does that mean TADO isn’t the game for me right now?
Well that depends, as we launch today, a new player, unfamiliar with the world will have quite a lot to do. You can complete the first two chapters of our main world story quest – it’s really difficult to put a time on this but most people will probably take quite a while to get through this. There’s also a lot of side quest content, activities like crafting and fishing, hunting for items, levelling your character, collecting Lore from around the world, transporting goods and beating down rare enemies alongside your fellow adventurers. There’s a lot to do, but its very possible you might enjoy it so much… that you’ll want to do more then there is content at the moment.
We’ve also gated a few zones today, which means whilst they are there – you can’t access them yet. If you find a portal that looks like this….
It means we were unable to get the area in today’s build… These areas we intend to open up over the next week.
We’re looking forward to seeing you shortly, we're looking like it will be just after 16:00 UTC
Have fun and strap in everyone! It will probably be a bit bumpy!
Monty
What's in a Skill anyway?
In TADO, as your character levels, you’re awarded stat points. These can be spent of any of the 15 currently available stats.
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On the left side you have your martial skills these are related to melee and ranged weapons, in the middle you have some armour types and shields and on the right you have a variety of schools of magic.
Each of these stats have their own related equipment and Skill Gems.
Stats themselves don't grant abilities, those come from Skill Gems. Skill Gems are found all over the world and come from all manner of activities. They may come from quests, bosses, or be hidden deep in caves waiting to be discovered, they pretty much come from all activities and part of exploration and levelling in TADO, is going around the world collecting up interesting and useful Skill Gems.
Once you have a Skill Gem and the related stats, you can equip it to one of the ten slots your character has available which than grants access to that ability on either or both of your weapon sets (assuming both your weapon sets can use the Skill that is!).
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Once its in your loadout, it appears on your hot bar at the ready for use in your next fight.
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There's already a lot of Skill Gems in the Early Access build and we will continue to add more as time goes on.
See you all shortly!
Monty
Updated Game Trailer!
Hello Adventurers!
Just a quick one, we've updated our game trailer which you can watch either on the Steam store page or on YouTube!
It had been looking a little dated for a while with some very historic content featured.
Enjoy!
Monty
Combat in TADO
As you can imagine with a third person RPG, the player will spend quite a lot of their time waving their weapons around and unloading devastating magical spells upon their enemies. In TADO we wanted to avoid very high paced action combat, but we also didn’t want to be in a place where combat was a matter of simply time.
During Steam Next Fest one of the things we got quite a lot of feedback on was combat, particularly as it related to melee strikes. TADO had a system where as you swing your sword your character would lock in place, play the related animation and deal damage.
This promoted, for melee least, you to stand toe-to-toe with the enemy slashing and blocking your way to victory, but it also came with some less than ideal user experience. Lots of people reported finding they would regularly miss their first attack, like when you're happily running forward you swing your sword missing because you weren't expecting to dead-stop mid run when you attacked.
The other issue was one of general ‘cluckiness’, the stopping and swinging would lead it to feeling quite unresponsive at times.
To make matters worse, we also had a number of abilities which when used also moved you forward somewhat, for example if you’re dual wielding the flurry attack would take a couple of steps forward leading to the opposite occurring and overshooting your intended target, not fun.
So where’s all this rambling going? Well since Next Fest melee combat (and to a lesser degree Magic) has been reworked to feel more dynamic and you can see a glimpse of this in surrounding clips. Your character when swinging will, based on what’s in front of them, either step forward/continue moving or stand still and swing if the target is too close. This in practise works well, as you run towards an enemy when you swing your blade your character will step into the attack, if you’re already nose to nose your character will swing without moving forward which in both cases should lead to a satisfying crack as the blow lands.
We’ve also added a target locking system, its mainly useful for melee, although ranged players can take advantage of it to. When locked to a target your character will always face them and strafe/circle around them, this feels particularly nice when you're fighting a boss or large enemy, where you want to keep your view focused on what its doing whilst navigating the dangers around it.
This does also work with ranged combat, but it won't lead your shots for you, so you're still required to aim if you want to hit something that doesn't want to be hit!
Overall this has made the combat feel a lot better, more in your control, which has also made the dodges and other movement skills feel more responsive and more useful overall.
See you all soon adventurers!
Monty
TADO Launch Roadmap
Greetings adventurers!
Steam Next Fest already seems like another lifetime ago and the time since has been spent polishing and refining many of the games core systems based on the feedback and data we gathered. Overall it was a really positive experience with far more people turning out to play than we expected.
Our original goal was to get the Steam Next Fest demo out, gather the feedback, tidy a few system bits and rush headfirst into Early Access somewhere between now and December. We’ve had a good look at that, and we’ve decided that’s probably not the best plan, not for our players or for us.
With that said, whilst it’s a little later than we’d hoped, we have now got a pretty firm date settled and that’s the 26th of January. We’ve also got a plan around the following two major content patches which takes us most of the way to full release (version 1) – though the timeline for these is a little shakier as you not doubt understand, but the areas are already significantly developed.
We’ve got a plan to post updates on game content in the run up to Early Access launch, both for the players who joined us in the Next Fest Demo and those still finding out about the game, so we will try not to be too quiet.
Feel free to jump in the Discord follow and Wishlist for all the latest updates as we head towards Early Access Launch
See you all gain soon Adventurers
Monty
A Week of Adventure!
Greetings Adventurers, what a week!
Over the last week we’ve had a demo running, with only a couple of minor interruptions for patching, and it’s been incredibly successful with Adventurers showing up from all around the world.
About a thousand new adventurers battled their way through the Darkened Crypt and found their way to Genmire helping the local townsfolk, hunting, crafting and generally just adventuring.
We’ve been blown away by the response, the feedback and engagement with our players. Unfortunately not everyone had a great experience, we had some real connectivity problems for some users, particularly in North America and Australia which led to poor load times between zones and less than ideal hit registration – something we will seek to improve, but overall we’ve been really happy to see people engaging with a relatively small piece of content for such lengthy periods of time – more than we had anticipated!
So what happens now? Well, we’re going to say goodbye to the demo server later this week, you’re free to jump on in the meantime if you want and say your fare wells to Genmire – for now least.
Then we’re going to spend some time going through the server logs analysing the data we’ve gathered, along with the feedback received on the Community Hub and the Discord and review what needs to be done that we didn’t already know about, what we need to add onto our current roadmap, before we can open up into Early Access, and even at this point the game world gets a whole lot bigger then what’s been seen so far.
Speaking of the roadmap, we will be looking to publish our Early Access and beyond roadmap towards the end of October when we should be able to give a good idea of when you can get back into Genmire, get your ship and sail off into the wider world.
How can you help? Well brave adventurers, you found your way to Genmire before anyone else, you know these lands better than anyone, join the Discord and the Community Hub, tell us what you liked (or didn’t!), Wishlist and Follow on Steam to help us reach other users' recommendations.
And yes, we will spawn more logs.
Take care Adventurers, and thanks for playing. Monty
Playable Demo is LIVE!
You can play The Adventurer’s Domain Online Demo from NOW until the 10th of October throughout the Steam Next Fest. Adventurers who play through the Demo and then join us later in the year when we hit Early Access will get to keep a unique cloak received when you make it to the first town.
Please Follow, Wishlist, tell your friends and join the Discord so we can keep you updated as we move past the Steam Next Fest and towards Early Access.
Hope to see you in the hills around Genmire, take care Adventurers!
What’s in the Demo?
So we’ve been working hard this year on getting TADO ready for Early Access and whilst there’s still some way to go, we aren’t that far off. With Steam Next Fest happening we thought we’d take the opportunity to put a sneak-peak demo out of what starting in the Adventurer’s Domain looks like.
The Demo itself mirrors the starting experience of a new player almost exactly. Depending on your play style, whether you want to just do the available quests or explore, craft, hunt down rares and lore, there’s a few hours of content here to start you off.
The Demo does have some restrictions you won’t see when we launch. After you leave the starting area and get out into the open world, the first large Island Genmire, the playable space is smaller than it appears, there’s some invisible walls keeping adventurers to the Demo’s playable area (sorry I know some of you want to play more of it!). There’s a good amount of land and a fair amount of water to explore (and we’ve left a few unlocked ships out there to play with).
Most people who play through the content find themselves with about 50 skill points to spend – though you could grind up more, learn to craft higher level weapons and armour, and max yourself out on highly refined Iron Equipment if you’re that kind of player.
If you have questions or issues, please feel free to jump in the Discord or post on the Community hub and we will do our best to get back to you.
Have fun Adventurers,
Monty
Early Access Update
Greetings Adventurers!
Its been a while since the Steam page went public and alpha testing started so we wanted to give an update on the fact we’re still alive and still moving towards Early Access launch.
So what’s been going on?
Well, we’ve had alpha servers running for a few months now, testing various mechanics and making sure the multiplayer and networking holds up – hopefully some of you have been enjoying the screenshots posted here from some of the testing. We’ve also made changes to the hardware the server/s runs on to provide greater capacity and more responsive performance from the AI elements – although this is something we expect might be tricky when we first open the doors and will be monitored closely.
We’ve also been collecting feedback, ironing out bugs and polishing the general experience.
As a result of this, we’re probably a little behind our original schedule with Early Access having intended to start in the first half of 2022 but this is looking likely to fall into the third quarter now. I know, we’ve had quite a lot of people interested and its always a shame when things take a little longer than we’d expect.
What’s left before Early Access?
There’s still some gaps in the ‘core’ quest line which prevents people getting as far as the content that's developed – there’s plenty to do outside the core quest experience but we want to make sure this runs a bit further than it currently does and gives Adventurer’s a good tour of the world and available activities.
There’s also quite a lot of content balancing to be done with hundreds of items, skills and monsters we don't want anything to feel too broken on Early Access launch.
Crafting and gathering is a core activity in TADO and we’ve recently changed the way crafting works to make it much more accessible to people who perhaps don’t want to master every trade skill but still want to find some value in those systems. We previously had a system where crafting would require you to dedicate points earned from levelling up to individual trade skills, but this felt overly restrictive and we've move to an 'on-use' level up system for all crafting and gathering skills. This feels good for people who aren't super into crafting, but also gives a strong sense of achievement as you master more trade skills for those completionists.
There’s also been a lot of work on content with new dungeons, bosses and quest areas having been introduced and several more to come before we open the gates to all adventurers.
Finally we’ve been paying a lot of attention to the ship control systems and travel time whilst out in the open seas. It’s a fun experience controlling a ship and exploring the world but if you find yourself doing a lot of travelling, maintaining the various sail heights and rotations starts to feel like busy work (particularly if you're playing solo!) and could become unfun and frustrating, so we’ve been working on slightly dialling back the ‘realism’ of the naval system and focusing more on making sure the gameplay is fun both in the moment to moment and when you’re making your 100th voyage at sea without undermining that great felting of being in control of some potentially very large vessels!
We’re looking forward to welcoming you all in The Adventurer’s Domain Online soon.
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